Monthly Archives: July 2014

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How to Love at Work and Not Feel Totally Awkward

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(This is a guest post from Rodney Mills, a leadership coach and speaker and close friend of Leadership Voices. You can read the original post on his blog or find out more about his services by clicking HERE. Sign up for his blog and get his latest eBook – The Personal Mastery Resource Kit – absolutely free!)

You know how a fish looks when you take it out of water? That’s how I look when I’m in the water! No kidding. So what am I doing signing up for a Triathlon?

drowning

That’s what I keep asking myself over and over. I’ve been running and cycling rigorously for a couple of years now, and I’ve even done a couple of duathlons. This triathlon thing has been on my bucket list for a long time, so I thought now is as good a time as ever to get it done.

But I can’t swim. Well, I can swim, it’s just not a very pretty sight. As I’ve been trying to explain my plight to family and friends, hoping for some sympathy, it dawned on me the reason I’m so uncomfortable with this skill.

Swimming is not a natural thing for me to do. I didn’t grow up around pools or lakes. For a few weeks, in the sixth grade, the school loaded us up on busses once a week to take us down to the local YMCA for swimming lessons. Then, one week each summer, I’d go to camp and get about an hour a day in the pool. That’s about it for me. No wonder swimming isn’t natural.

We learn to run fairly quickly. My mom says when I was two, I was so efficient at running, I scaled a ladder leaned up against the house and ran up and down the roof line, evading my dad’s best efforts to rescue me, while my mom nearly died of heart failure. Running is natural for me.

Now, riding a bike? That wasn’t very natural at first. But it didn’t take much time until the training wheels came off. Before long, I joined the other Evil Kenevils of the world, screaming out, “Look Ma! No Hands!” Cycling is very natural to me now.

The reason I’m not comfortable swimming yet is because I haven’t done it enough. I’ve got to work on my breathing and my stroke. I’ve got to be okay with keeping my face down in the water. I’ve got to stop worrying about what everybody thinks of how I look in my Speedo. (Okay. I don’t wear a Speedo. I promise you: I never will!) 

Why am I telling you all this? Hang in there with me a minute and I think you’ll get it.

In my last post, I talked about the Four Pillars of Trust: Integrity, Humility, Gratitude, and Generosity. If you didn’t get a chance to read that, click HERE to go back and check it out. My argument is that trust is the “currency of leadership” (or any relationship for that matter). Trust is the basis of permission-based leadership as opposed to positional leadership which relies on command and control.

In that post, I also promised we would talk about the Foundation of Servant Leadership. It’s a very simple concept – just one word – yet it is profoundly difficult to fully grasp. That foundation is: love.

Since I first started studying servant leadership several years ago, one thing has puzzled me more than any other: What is the motive for servant leading? Other than believing it seems like a noble way to lead, how could it ever be natural? Well, the answer is found in this foundational truth of love.

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Leadership Lessons from 1776

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LL from 1776 - 1“Men make history…not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.”

—Harry S. Truman, 33rd U.S. President (1945–1953)

Is there a better quote to have for today than this one?

My goal today is to be short and sweet! And I would just leave you today with a few thoughts on this most important secular holiday of the year. Here are those thoughts:

We are living in a chaotic world of rapid and revolutionary change. Unfortunately, much of that change is not positive. Therefore, rising above the current situation and learning to adapt, manage, and lead a positive change process is essential to survival. Wisdom, agility, discernment, and expertise in the area of change leadership are essential to leaders today. All leaders must learn to navigate change, but all of the truly great leaders today are masters of leading change, revolutionary change. Whether international, institutional or organizational change, a mass movement, a world-wide protest, or a nonviolent revolution; learning to lead and organize people and resources around a positive, constructive, creative, and dynamic shared vision of change is indispensable to success.

LL from 1776 - 2But we must do so much more than organizing people and resources. These are skills of a manager or an expert in logistics. What this country needs is another generation of Washingtons, Jeffersons, Adams, Franklins, Reveres, Hancocks, and so many other brave men who put ink on a piece of parchment that for many, sealed their doom.

But their leadership and signature did something else.

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Louis Zamperini

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Louis Zamperini, Olympian, WWII Veteran, and POW passed away yesterday.

I was very saddened to hear the news.  He became an inspiration to me through his amazing tale of survival and redemption through Christ.  He is my hero.  

I had the amazing honor of spending an entire day with the hero when he came to Houston’s First Baptist to speak about his life.  I was afforded the amazing honor of being his driver and spending precious moments with this incredible man.

Thank you, Louis for being Unbroken.  Thank you Jesus for being Broken for us.

Louis…see ya soon.

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Leaders of the Past – Better than Today?

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Better than today - 1Sitting at lunch yesterday with one our most prolific authors on LeadershipVoices.com and with a new author who is going to be providing some interesting content in the coming days, our conversation was about leadership and the leadership crisis in our culture today. One of my hypotheses is that we are just one generation away from losing our society and our culture due to the lack of leadership skills today. One of my lunch companions had a much more optimistic view that we are several generations away. All I know for sure is that there is a distinct lack of leadership exhibited today. And it “seems” that there were better leaders and more leadership skills in the past.

And it seems that leaders of the past almost always seem more effective than those of today. Perhaps it is a perceptual bias: We long for what we don’t have, and mythologize what we used to have. But even taking this bias into consideration, many of today’s leaders don’t seem to measure up to our expectations.

According to a survey conducted by the Harvard Kennedy School several years ago, 68% of Americans believe that there is a “leadership crisis” in the country; and leaders in only four out of thirteen sectors polled inspire above average confidence. Those sectors were the military, the Supreme Court, non-profit organizations, and medical institutions. Leaders of the news media, Congress, and Wall Street receive the lowest scores. Who is surprised by this?

Better than today - 2My parents used to tell me that the leaders of their day not only inspired confidence, but respect and reverence as well. They talked about Roosevelt, Churchill, Eisenhower, Gandhi, and others of that generation as larger than life figures. Growing up, I had the same impressions of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, and others. Sure they had their flaws, but they were courageous and decisive, and could communicate in ways that made it clear what they stood for.

But today’s public figures don’t seem to inspire the same confidence. According to recent Gallup figures, only 29% of Americans think that President Obama is doing a good job; and only 7% have a favorable view of Congress.

The irony is it’s likely that more money has been spent on leadership development in the last two decades — in both the public and private sectors — than was probably spent in the previous ten decades combined (admittedly I’m guessing here; no figures seem to be available). All I know for sure is that my personal leadership consulting practice is up this year over last year and that year was up over the previous year. So why are we not turning out better leaders across the board? Let me suggest two possibilities — and perhaps readers will add others:

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